New Books! (Grown-Ups Are Dumb, Sonic, Binky, Robin Hood, Little Mouse)

I had to do the ordering from our review lists for October, and got several graphic novels as a result:

Grown-Ups Are Dumb (No Offense) by Alexa Kitchen 978-142311331-7
She's billed as the world's youngest cartoonist. It's a cute book, although paperback. I don't get a lot of the humor, but this is by a kid for kids so I hope it goes well.

Sonic Select: Book One, various authors compiled by Archie Comics 978-1-879794-29-0
I got this one to add to the various Sonic titles requested. It's all old stuff from the 80s. This art looks more "cleaned up" than other volumes, in that it doesn't look like it was scanned straight out of the comic itself, but re-colored for this book.

Binky, the Space Cat by Ashley Spires 978-1-55453-309-1
I love this. The text, though minimal, is very matter-of-fact that Binky can, in fact, be training in secret to fight aliens (aka, household bugs) and fly off into space. There is litter-box humor, but nothing too gross (what do you expect? He's a cat.)

Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood by Tony Lee 978-076364399-7
This is definitely for older kids. People die, and one character has his eyes put out. The art is very dark. I almost gave it to the Teen Librarian for her collection. However, the actual gore is kept to a minimum (the missing eyes, for example, are more dark shadows than gaping sockets), and I feel a need for good Robin Hood retellings in our section of the library.

Little Mouse Gets Ready by Jeff Smith 978-1-935179-01-6
In direct contrast to Outlaw, this is a short, sweet book that could easily slide into the picture book section and not be noticed. It's published by the same company that produced Luke on the Loose (which went into our collection before I started this blog). The art is brown backgrounds with lots of color for Little Mouse's clothes, and the story is very easy to follow. Like I said, cute.

Review: The Weasel Patrol

The Weasel Patrol by Ken Macklin and Lela Dowling (987-0-9790750-8-7)

This just in: The Weasel Patrol is on the loose in space. This is great black and white slapstick. The motto of the Patrol is "Protect. Serve. Run Away." Leroy and his fellow weasels do so with fine form, catching the bad guys every time. (They even have their priorities straight: rescuing the Cheezies is more important than contraband, after all.) When reading this with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I was trying hard not to laugh and disturb my co-workers. As I said, this is slapstick, so no one gets hurt worse than the Coyote ever did to the Roadrunner. The only problem kids might have is the challenge of the vocabulary, but hey, that's what the dictionary is for.